Sunday, August 30, 2015

As a broad generalisation, I feel that testing is only noticed when someone (the tester) has messed up. A few months ago I had a pretty open conversation with a workmate on how they felt unappreciated and undervalued. After all, when code goes into production and all goes well - usually one doesn't applaud the tester for finding all of the bugs and helping improve the software quality by communicating information about it (before going live).

I really could relate to my workmate as I recall many times where my input into a project seemed to be forgotten or ignored. Some code would go live, which I tested vigorously, and then only the developer would be mentioned. This happened in both team-wide forums and tools you could use to give "kudos" to someone.